7 News Belize

Dengue: The Real Situation
posted (July 9, 2010)
In the last couple of months, we've aired two stories featuring Dengue. We ran the most recent story yesterday, and during this reporter's often fruitless search for answers on the topic, a number of names and key people within the Health department, were bounced around, that is, except one, Dr. Jose Antonio Marenco.

Dr. Marenco is the Director of Environmental Health Program and heads the vector control unit, which essentially is responsible for the eradication and control of communicable diseases such as Malaria and Dengue.

During a break at the Ministry Of Health's dengue situation assessment meeting today in Belmopan I had the opportunity to discuss with him at some length the growing public concern about the rising incidences of Dengue.

Dr. Jose Antonio Marenco
"There is an increase number, perhaps above the expected numbers for Cayo and Belize District. What we have perhaps notice is that there are some more Hemorrhagic cases that are more of concern and of course you know with the hemorrhagic cases the whole issues of case management begins playing a important role, not just the issues of controlling the vector and so on, so dengue is a very complex disease and many countries in Central America with even greater resources than Belize are having problems with the control of dengue in the Central American region we have Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, reporting increase 300 folds increase in numbers compare to the same period of last year."

Jim McFadzean
"Are these neighboring Countries their approach to this problem any different than our strategy being use here in Belize to attack the problem of dengue?"

Dr. Jose Antonio Marenco
"It's generally none apart from training the doctors apart from handling of the cases another very important area is the control of the vector. How do we control the vector? We do it by the persons in their own homes, eliminating breathing sites; any container that holds water after 10 days can be producing mosquitoes. The same mosquitoes that will transmit the disease, so our emphasis has been always to recommend and try to promote that the persons in their own homes clean their back yards and only when there is a need, then we also conduct the sprays in operations that we are doing country wide know."

Jim McFadzean
"Any reason why Belize District and Cayo District have this spike in numbers? Have you all evaluated why these 2 districts show a particular rise in Dengue cases?"

Dr. Jose Antonio Marenco
"Sure, this disease is certainly consider an urban disease, in urban like setting the more considered the population is the higher the risk of easier transmission from one person, one mosquito concentration of people is a key factor explosive dengue out breaks can happen where ever there is more people together, that's one factor the simple concentration of people is one factor, and added to this, is the presents of breading site make it a bad combination."

Jim McFadzean
"How will you deal with this problem in record keeping that seems to be an ongoing issue between private practitioners not wanting to share that information are you all going to address that today at this meeting?"

Dr. Jose Antonio Marenco
"We have invited a representative from the Belize Medical and Dental association in this meeting, as we have done in the pass trying to somehow get them closer to work with us and report these cases. We respect all these issues of confidentiality and preference you know, that they have for particular doctors. But when it comes to the protections of the larger group of people, we feel that there are some issues, like this one where share information is important."

Marenco says the vector control unit will step up its fumigation efforts this rainy season.

Since the start of this year, the Ministry of Health has received 348 reports of clinical cases of Classical Dengue Fever, 30 of which have been laboratory confirmed at the Central Medical Laboratory and 42 diagnosed as Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. The majority of these cases - 142 of them - have been identified in the Cayo (142 cases) and Belize districts

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